"The West is facing a concerted effort by Islamic jihadists, the motives and goals of whom are largely ignored by the Western media, to destroy the West and bring it forcibly into the Islamic world -- and to commit violence to that end even while their overall goal remains out of reach. That effort goes under the general rubric of jihad."-- Robert Spencer

Friday, June 03, 2005

AI Promotes Human Rights Abuses

So America- and Israel-hating Amnesty International radicals think that Guantanamo is the "gulag of our time." Yawn. What's new. That's the problem with hyperbole. As with PETA's execrable "Holocaust on Your Plate" campaign, equating banal trivialities with historical monstrosities makes otherwise caring people angry, and then they tune out.

And that's the real story. Organizations filled with pampered do-gooders forfeit their opportunity to do any actual good by waxing hysterical any time we forget the olive in a detainee's (non-alcoholic) martini. Further, the more airtime that gets diverted to hand-wringing over rumors of flushed Qur'ans is attention diverted from beheadings, suicide bombings, and dead children.

There are many valid critiques to level at AI. Moral equivalency. Double standards. A presumption that the hotly disputed Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions constitutes settled international law. A total ignorance of asymmetrical warfare. Overlooking all the privileges detainees are afforded, and how much transparency does exist, considering that we give them Qur'ans and know about Gitmo at all. No awareness whatsoever that terrorists have often been trained to lie about mistreatment in captivity, and actively promote the wanton murder of civilians.

If one wanted to get snippy, one could point out that the head of AI, an organization that sits in judgment of a war against jihad, Irene Khan, is a Muslim. Or that AI's executive director and chairmen are donors to the campaigns of Sens. Kerry and Kennedy. And, Amnesia International seems to have forgotten about those other gulags on the island of Cuba.

But above all, they forget that every single detainee at Gitmo was picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan, and could have been simply shot on the spot -- perfectly legally. We don't, because we need the intel. AI doesn't consider that all these "secret" CIA prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq may have sprung up because of AI's endless bitching when we do tell them what we're up to.

If AI really cared about the detainees, they'd stop waging a propaganda war against their captors and demanding perfection. They'd shut up, play nice, and try to get what access and privileges they could. But they don't, which raises the question of what their priority is, then. It's hard not to conclude that it's to undermine a Republican administration they hate more than the head-choppers. Net result, they wind up assisting the enemy, which has a demonstrated human rights record that ranks a notch below atrocious.

Nice work, AI. You wail impotently. We'll try to ignore you, and get back to defending civilization.

UPDATE: AI's executive director William Schulz admits that he doesn't "know for sure" if Gitmo is a gulag, "has no idea" if Rumsfeld has approved torture and starvation, and has "absolutely no idea" if the ICRC has access or not. So speculation and unfounded allegation is what passes for hard-hitting investigation these days. How about talking to someone who worked there? One guard notes that "the international media makes regular visits (almost every week when I was stationed there)"; and "the ICRC is there all the time. They don't just make occasional visits."